1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to computer network environments. More specifically, the invention relates to quality control and monitoring the time required to service requests.
2. Description of Related Art
Current quality-of-service monitors used in web server management applications collect metrics on the end user experience, the page display, and the service times. The metrics collected for the service time are focused on the service time needed to retrieve the container page only. The container page is the initially requested resource. However, this page may contain other resources that need to be retrieved in order to fulfill the request. Examples of other resources include images and embedded applications (i.e. anything embedded in the container page that needs to be retrieved with a separate request). Current quality control monitors do not track the service time taken to retrieve these other resources.
In prior art QoS, there is no timing mechanism for any of the inline content that makes up a complete web page. When a page is requested using Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), the container page is delivered to the web browser. At that point, the web browser parses the page and makes separate requests for each of the inline elements contained in that web page. Each of these requests is stateless, by the very nature of HTTP 1.0, and potentially stateless in HTTP 1.1. Stateless, means that the software does not keep track of configuration settings, transaction information, or any other data for the next session.
In a distributed environment, it is not reasonable to assume that the web server that responded to the request for the container page is the same web server that will be asked to deliver all, or even any, of the inline elements of the page. Even if the QoS that serviced the original request (container page) received a new request for one of the inline members of the container page, it has no mechanism for recognizing the new request as a member of the original request.
Therefore, it would be desirable to have a method for monitoring the service time needed to retrieve a web page, including the container page and all inline elements.